Gary and Bill,
I am simply going to assume that Gary is required by the nature of his employment at Cisco to adhere to company line in all public fora with regard to technology, even when the assertions of that company line are clearly mistaken. At least 5 messages have specifically answered Gary's original point, which was to 1) declare the 5ESS "old world" technology, 2) down play the attractiveness of the 7R/E product portfolio by incorrectly asserting that packet traffic would be bogged down by the TDM backplane, 3) assert that within 2-3 years no one would be buying new 5ESS platforms, and 4) suggest LU was doomed to failure, implying that the coup de grace would be administered by his employer Cisco Systems.
Now he asserts that LU's "VoIP strategy" - in quotes by Gary, I assume to suggest that it is anything but a strategy - is based on the Definity PBX, which he supports by posting a link to a posting that clearly reports that LU is deploying the capability to support VoIP on 8 different products, only one of which is the Definity PBX.
Let me suggest that there is a broad continuum of enterprise customers. Some, for whom lower cost moves/changes is a significant benefit and for whom system reliability is a minor consideration will be early adopters of a complete LAN based voice solution. Others, with fairly stable configurations and a high need for system reliability wouldn't consider a LAN based solution for many years and for very good reasons. Still others will pursue a hybrid approach - LAN based telephony for fluid departments and traditional PBX for mission critical applications. We can argue about how large each of these segments might be, but LU has solutions for each segment, including the early adopters - look up what LU is doing, don't just shoot from the hip - Cisco has no answer for the last two segments. Thus the company line portraying LU as hopelessly rooted in Definity PBX - good marketing, bad industry research.
Next, in his most recent post, Gary wonders if selling 5ESS platforms will be an impediment to competing in the future. POTS lines are growing 10%+ a year, with LU taking a ton of share. No one has introduced any IP or ATM equipment that can compete for this CO market - tandems yes, but not COs. CLECs and alternative LD providers like Qwest and Level3 have purchased hundreds of millions of dollars worth of class 5 switches in the last 2 years. Have they doomed themselves to being uncompetitive, and if so who is left who hasn't? Preserving this investment is a real world requirement and I can't understand the criticism of a product strategy that allows seamless transition to new trunking technologies under the same feature sets, under the same management software, that does NOT institute a TDM bottleneck, since packet traffic does NOT traverse the backplane. Second, Lucent does have a terrific set of technologies for those companies that have not already purchased 5ESS switches (which also can support all flavors of wireless). For the third time, I urge you to check out the PathStar. Not to mention the tandem bypass technologies still under wraps at Ascend. Make no mistake, LU is not passive, it is not sitting on its heels. LU intends to lead in every carrier growth market. It is not paralyzed by protecting its 5ESS revenue stream.
Finally, you are assuming that IP, as currently configured is the most important building block of next generation networks. 5 years from now, I think we will all be talking about the coming transition to optical switching technologies and customer dedicated wavelengths. IP will be one of many protocols supported - a very important one for sure, but NOT the only one. I feel pretty comfortable that LU will have alot to say about the next, next generation networks.
I am sorry if it seems as though I have an axe to grind agains either you (Gary) or CSCO. You are trying to define the debate on your terms, and in doing so, choosing assumptions to reduce the opposing view point to absurdity. Good marketing. However, it is not the technical or business truth. Personally, I am assuming that you (gary) understand all of this, but cannot respond appropriately. |
